A Pigeon Among the Cats (7 page)

Gwen turned up late as usual. She had been eating an ice in one of the little places off the terrace and had missed seeing the ‘Roseanna' party leaving. She did not mention the fact that Owen had plucked her out of the back row of their lot and brought the ice for her and left her eating it while he went off, he said, to have an urgent pee. But he had come back quite soon.

Later that day, talking to Mrs. Banks at the hotel, she heard the story of Rose Lawler's exploit.

“Those friends of hers, Mrs. Donald and Miss Jeans, think she must have been pushed. The crowds were terrible, weren't they?”

Gwen agreed. The crowds had been terrible. It had been terrible too, and exciting, to come across Owen again. She wasn't going to get rid of him in a hurry. But she'd better not confide in Rose yet once more. Because it was more than likely Owen had tried to get rid of her in a hurry.

She sighed. It was difficult to know what to do for the best. Later that evening she put through a call to England from the hotel. This time she took the precaution of sending her message and request for advice in code.

The ‘Roseanna' tour left Rome the next morning in a light drizzle that did not begin to lift until noon. This was a pity because the road passed through particularly beautiful, at times spectacular, country with tall hills covered with trees to the summit, the limestone rock from which they sprouted held in at the base where it touched the road by wide stretches of wire mesh.

But the rain damped down the colours and the contours and also the spirits of the tourists. Billie tried to rouse them with some account of the history of this part of Tuscany, never a peaceful one. But Gwelphs and Ghibellines, their distinctive battlements on their towers, their never-ending feud, meant nothing at all to the travellers, who could not be roused until the coach emerged upon open highway, with Assisi high upon its hill in the distance.

Mrs. Lawler had woken that day very stiff in the legs and back. She had slept well for several hours from sheer exhaustion, but had woken before dawn finding it an agony to turn over, and from then on had suffered with every move until she had forced herself to get up, take an aspirin, apply such massage as she could to her own back and thighs, he down again and wait with forced patience for the relief of movement in an upright position.

Sitting in the bus had meant renewed agony for poor Rose. She could hardly force herself to stand up when the coach stopped at Assisi in the big car park halfway up the hill. But her friends helped her, though Gwen, after trying to drag her out of her seat without any success, laughed nervously and toning hopped away and down the steps of the coach in front of Mr. Banks, who applied his extra strength to the job of getting Mrs. Lawler upright. Myra and Flo, by easy stages and with much encouragement, did the rest. The tour was to take lunch at an hotel in Assisi and do their sight-seeing in the afternoon. By the time the three women had made a slow march to this hotel Rose declared the walk had done the trick. The stiffness, finally broken, had disappeared.

“It usually goes this way,” she declared. “But I didn't realise how bad it was going to be, or I might, have done something about it last night before I went to bed.”

“What, for instance?” Myra asked.

“Asked you to give me a rub. I take oil about with me even now. But I'd forgotten how much worse it was likely to be at my present advanced age.”

The other two exchanged glances.

“I think it is high time, Rose,” Flo said, “that you told us what exactly you taught in your schools or what your hobbies were or are that let you perform these Olympic stunts at will.”

“Not at will! Sheer necessity! Most unwillingly.”

“But what?”

Mrs. Lawler hesitated. She certainly dad not want coach gossip, tour gossip, to spread rumours or even true facts about her. To most of them her profession would mean nothing. To be reasonable, to very few indeed of her fellow-travellers. Why did she hesitate? She knew the answer. She had an immediate picture before her eyes of a wrinkled face, a crooked smile, a complete awareness of the meaning of her graceful, successful escape from injury at the Colosseum. But they had left Rome. Oh yes, they had left Rome. And the long black car had not been in the Assisi car park. Or not yet.

“I trained at Bedford,” she said quietly. “I was a junior games and gym mistress at one girls' school in the south midlands before the war and at another in the south-west after I was demobbed and my boy started school.”

“You were able to pick it all up again?” Myra asked, astonished.

“I did a refresher course. I trained. It was the only thing I could do. I was no good at academic stuff.”

“But top-class in your own line,” Flo said, admiringly.

There was a short silence. Then Rose said, “Unless anyone wants to know exactly what I taught at schools I'd rather neither of you explained to them.”

“They won't,” Myra said confidently, “They may have had some sort of P.T., even gym apparatus, but I don't mink the hockey or lacrosse games mistress would mean a thing.”

“Don't be such a snob,” Flo told her.

“Does
that
mean anything these days?” Rose laughed. “Snob, anti-snob! All a mix-up of nonsense, isn't it? People trying to fit themselves into a class they want to belong to, or think they belong to, or want other people to think they belong to, or …”

“Stop!” Myra cried. “My head's spinning!”

Gwen Chilton arrived almost first at the hotel. She had been hurrying, partly from fear, but chiefly from curiosity. Owen had told her he would keep in touch but he had not said where he would see her next. It was like him to go to the catacombs, frightening her half out of her wits; coming up behind her, not to pinch her bottom as the Italian boys did, but to whisper in her ear, wanting to know what the old schoolmarm snooper was doing in the garden up above instead of down here where he'd expected.

“She's done this place before. She just wanted to rest in the shade, she said,” Gwen had told him.

“Rest, my arse,” he breathed, making her giggle.

“Hers, you mean.”

“Don't be rude, darling.”

Heads turned in their direction. Owen slipped into the darkness, but was soon at her ear again.

“I shall keep in touch,” he whispered this time and she felt fingers at her neck as well as breath on her ear. “So don't get tangled with the old bitch or we'll have to eliminate her.”

He had gone after this and did not appear again until they were leaving the Colosseum mat afternoon. Having made sure she was out of sight of the staircase.

So was Rose Lawler's spectacular descent set off by Owen? Several of the tour had asked her if Mrs. Lawler had been pushed?

She could truthfully say she did not know, but it wouldn't be surprising, would it? These crowds do push, don't they?

But she had a shrewd idea it had been Owen, pushing deliberately. Especially since, that very morning, a small man had pressed a note into her hand as she left the Rome hotel. She had slipped it into her bag and now looked forward to reaching the Assisi lunch hotel before the rest of their lot, to open the note in the safe privacy of the toilet.

Owen had written briefly: “Meet me Assisi 2.00 p.m. upper church.” He had not signed it or even addressed it in any way inside or out. So how had the little man known her? She shivered, feeling eyes about her in every direction, all her movements watched, enemies ready to pounce at every stage, upon each day of what should have been a safe, if boring, interval in a carefully planned operation.

But she pulled herself together, as she always had done and so far with more than reasonable success. When she joined the three egg heads, as she now thought of them, she was her most controlled shy self, no trace of the false hysteric who had caused them so much embarrassment from time to time.

Rose Lawler could only tell herself that Rome had done Gwen good and that must really be Owen Strong's doing. Time would show if his pursuit of the girl was genuine. They would know that if he turned up in Florence. In the meantime she and her friends had much to enjoy and would not be hampered by guides other than their Baedekers and maps.

Gwen did not offer to join them. The four had coffee together in the hotel lounge, but when Myra, Flo and Rose took up their handbags and cameras with purposeful glances at one another and a polite question to her, she shook her head, getting out a fresh cigarette to light from the stub she took from her lips. They left her sitting there, staring out of the window, making no sign even to those members of the tour who remarked upon her strange inertia as they passed her.

“I can't make out that young woman at all,” Myra said as they climbed the hill slowly towards the church. “Can you, Rose?”

“Not really,” Mrs. Lawler answered. Her own thoughts were too fantastic to be shared.

Until, in one of the darker recesses of the first church, she passed a stooping figure that she recognised. For a couple of seconds she thought of accosting him, but then recoiled from the impulse and passed on. This was helped by Flo, who asked her from behind where it was they expected to find certain of the famous Giotto paintings of the life of the Saint. When she had confirmed the answer from her guide book she looked round again, but Owen Strong had disappeared.

He had been startled, waiting in his dark corner, to see Mrs. Lawler at all. Her exploit at the Colosseum, that he had admired as much as he deplored its success and his own consequent failure had, so Rollo had told him, certainly crippled the woman, if only temporarily. So he had judged it safe to have a word with Gwen in Assisi. He had no doubt she had got his note. Rollo never let him down, over simple little jobs of communication, especially as the bread-line journalist had been done out of an expected scoop, “Englishwoman falls at Colosseum” by the heroine of the episode from her hospital bed, or an obituary if that was the alternative.

Yet she was here, no more crippled than the rest of that lot with their obvious arthritis, obesity and corns, he thought contemptuously, watching the mixed tourist crowd, waiting for Gwen.

When she came at last, saw him, went to look at a picture near him, waited until his voice at her ear, as in the catacombs said quietly, “Go back to the entrance. I'll join you outside,” he moved away at last and Mrs. Lawler, who had seen Gwen arrive, guessed the whole of the subsequent action, though she did not stay to watch it.

The three friends enjoyed the frescoes in the second church, returned to buy postcards in the entrance of the first and then set off into the little town to look at the many shops full of Assisi embroidery worked upon cloths of many sizes and upon clothes for women and children. The patterns were charming, they decided, but the linen upon which they were embroidered was mostly rather poor and the threads uneven in the warp and weft so that the embroidery was not based, as it should be, on squares of counted threads but must have been worked upon a printed outline, quite another thing altogether.

Flo declared she did not mind how they were done they were so pretty and bought a dress for a small niece. But Myra, who had made table mats for herself in the correct manner upon Irish linen, refused to buy, while Mrs. Lawler, whose legs were beginning to ache again, left her friends to walk slowly back to the coach, taking photographs on the way.

When Gwen joined Owen at the door of the church he led her at once up a narrow street that came out behind the top end of the large car park. Here, almost hidden from every direction was the long black car she recognised. He unlocked it and motioned her inside. She recoiled from the oven heat of the interior.

“Get in,” he insisted. “I want to talk to you.”

She was repelled by this rough order.

“You can't take that tone with me!” she cried. “And I'm not going to be roasted to suit your convenience, so you can get that straight.”

He realised he had gone too far, too fast. This bird gave an impression of weakness but he really knew already that it was false.

Without speaking he wound down all the windows. The car may have been in the sun when he parked, but it was now in the shade and though the air of the early afternoon had not cooled at all, where the car stood was at the top of the hill and a breeze did blow through it to replace the over-heated air.

“How about that?” he said gently, looking at her with far from gentle eyes.

Gwen accepted the meaning of the look and climbed in, though she shot up from the seat at once, crying out that the leather had burned her. With silent patience Owen pulled forward a cushion from the back seat for her to sit on, then got in himself on the other side. His intention was as firm as ever, but he understood that he had no easy job before him.

Gwen was flattered by his persistence. Her natural vanity had always been a danger to her, and for some months now it had not been fed to anything like the extent she required. Or so she often told herself.

So Owen's cautious approach was unexpectedly successful, he found. Before long he was able to slide an arm behind her shoulders and allowed to leave it there until he dared to move it where the effect could be greater.

“I had to see you again,” he murmured, truthfully. “You aren't angry with me?”

“No,” she whispered, accepting this familiar approach. “But how did you know we'd be here? Who was that funny little man in Rome?”

“My messenger? Rollo? A journalist who does me a favour now and then.”

“Journalist!”

He felt her pull away, so held her more closely.

“Do you mind that? Why should you? Scared of the Press? He's only free-lance and not often employed, I should think.”

Allowing his curiosity a too free rein he added, laughing a little in his almost soundless fashion, “I guarantee he never leaves the Imperial City. He is never in Geneva, for instance.”